VDH Watch 22: War with Iran? Vic says, Pues, es claro

One of the telenovelas currently running on Telemundo, Tierra de Pasiones, features a priest whose signature saying is, "Pues, es claro." (Well, it's obvious.)

That's pretty much the attitude Victor Davis Hanson takes whenever the Bush administration wants to go to war. Our man Vic is as eager to please as a little puppy. So he makes up war propaganda with historical references that are masterpieces of hackery. Do we really need to go to war? Pues, es claro for Vic if Bush says it's time for another one.

In this Claremont Institute symposium, Vic expounds the testosterone theory of war with special reference to Iran. We just have to show them thar mullahs how tought we are, and they'll do what we want them to. He says, with a sneer at the wusses who might be hesitant to start another preventive war:

Apparently no one believes that stopping the Iranian bomb would humiliate the mullahs and teach others in the region not to try something similar—even though Libya gave up its WMD arsenal, by its own admission, only because Muammar al-Qadhafi feared the fate of Saddam Hussein.

Uh, no, Vic. That's not what happened with the Libyan WMD program. Dafna Hochman provides a reality-based analysis of the various factors that went into that decision in Rehabilitating a Rogue: Libya’s WMD Reversal and Lessons for US Policy Parameters (US Army War College) Spring 2006.

Vic's ravings may be so off-base as to sound completely ditzy. But as "Bush's favorite historian", he's taken seriously - at least as a propagandist - by the people in the Bush administration who have already demonstrated they are willing to start wars and kill people based on just this kind of ditzy "reasoning".

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